[What is artistic research? ]

This is a difficult question, but I would call artistic research a MacGuffin. A MacGuffin is a plot device in movies, basically an empty shell. Because if you take, for example, musical composers, they would claim that the teaching of composition since Pythagoras is artistic research. Actually, composers have been part of the scientific system, the higher sciences, since the Middle Ages and before. Or writers would say that poetics since Aristotle is artistic research. Or architects would say that architectural theory has been artistic research since Alberti. And designers might say that design research since the Bauhaus is research. Visual artists would probably say that at least since conceptual art we have such a thing as artistic research, but that maybe you could even go back to Leonardo, for example, and even any kind of art practice. 

But it's only the academics who work in the institutional field of artistic research who claim that it's a discipline that was invented in the 1990s by Christopher Frayling. It was a bit surprising to me when I first learned about this. 

But maybe the most general definition of artistic research is research that is done as an art practice or as an art project. But it can also be art that uses the working methods and tools of academic and non-academic research. 

[What is the difference with research in the sciences and humanities?]

I would say the most obvious difference is that artistic research does not produce reproducible results. It's not validated, and it may not even have a claim to truth. And in some cases it might even be inappropriate science, to the point of including manipulation and lies. If you exclude that from the possibilities of artistic practice and artistic research, I think you have a real problem. 

But maybe we can differentiate by drawing a broader spectrum of sciences and research disciplines. Maybe the most rigorous and formalized research is in mathematics. Then it gets a little bit more empirical in the hard sciences. Then you go to the social sciences, then to the humanities, and finally you end up with artistic research as the least rigorously disciplined research discipline. I would describe this as a spectrum of a progressively decreasing principle of "quod erat demonstrandum," that is, the quod erat demonstrandum in a formal proof or in scientific theories that are verified by formal proofs, which includes the reproducibility of results and methods. Ultimately, you could call it a difference between objectivity and subjectivity, although there is much to be said about the so-called objectivity of the hard sciences in terms of discourse, politics, and the like. But there is clearly a difference in terms of formal methods, proofs, and reproducibility. 

[What is the "added value" / "Mehrwert" of artistic research? 

You see, one problem is the German word "Mehrwert". If you use it the way Karl Marx used it, it translates as "surplus value," and that's part of his economic theory. So I thought you were asking an economic question that I might not be able to answer because I'm not an economist. Well, if you stay with Marx, you could say that artistic research naturally serves as surplus value for those who practice it, by gaining [social] distinction, in Bourdieu's sense. That is, artists gain a higher social and professional status [by becoming researchers], which is nothing new. 

This already happened, for example, in the Neoplatonic Academy of Marsilio Ficino in the Florentine Renaissance, where artists were promoted to fellow philosophers. Conversely, there are scholars in the humanities who use speculative, essayistic, and artistic means to distinguish themselves from the average academic. Take, for example, an academic like Avital Ronell. 

But if you're talking about social or societal value [of artistic research], I'm not so sure. Perhaps you could best answer this question for design research, which has the potential, for example, to think about ecological and social problems in a different way than traditional empirical sciences. From an artistic point of view, if we reverse the perspective and approach this question not from the perspective of academic research, but from the perspective of art practice, then the clear surplus value or added value of artistic research is that it relativizes or even eliminates naive romantic assumptions about what artistic practice is. 

[What is the urgency of artistic research?]

Again, this is a very difficult question. I think the real question is: for whom is it urgent? Certainly I think artists [and everyone else] should do their research out of an existential necessity and urgency. There's nothing more depressing than art, whether it calls itself artistic research or not, that's not driven by some urgency. And I have to say, working in an art school and also in the larger art system, this [lack of urgency] is too often the reality. 

In that sense, your question is almost redundant, because it's a general question that applies to any kind of art and artistic practice. It becomes more difficult when it comes to the existential need for society to have a discipline called artistic research, as opposed to already existing disciplines. I would be a bit cautious about this, because often enough the claims of urgency and necessity boil down to promises being made. For example, the European Bauhaus project, which seems to be based on the assumption that only artists and designers can solve today's existential problems, such as the climate crisis and catastrophes, the collapse of capitalism, and so on. But I'm a little afraid [of overpromising]. Because in the end it comes back to the [earlier] question of verification and reproduction [of research]. I think it's a very risky gamble to assume that artists, designers, and others who do this kind of research can actually deliver on such promises. If you overpromise, then you end up building a speculative bubble, like in the banking system, where I think you can end up shooting yourself in the foot very badly if you overpromise. 

[What is the relevance of artistic research for art and cultural education?]

I think you are referring specifically to cultural and arts education? Like art education in schools or educational programs in museums? 

A really good example of this was last year's documenta fifteen. I think the whole documenta fifteen was a huge experiment in creating a commons. Not just depicting a commons or thinking about the commons in art, but actually creating a commons in real life and seeing what happens. Including everything that goes wrong and even horribly wrong, as we know. Everything I saw at documenta fifteen qualified as artistic research. 

I think that was perhaps the most important takeaway from documenta fifteen, that it introduced a method of speculation and experimentation that is also a real-life experiment with the potential to transform art pedagogy and art education into something more radical. I often think it is a problem of art education that it ends up being complacent. It just wants to make everyone a better citizen and integrate everyone into society [as it is]. This is also the typical downfall of community art projects. Of course, you could argue that what ruangrupa and documenta fifteen did was also community art, and also very much driven by an educational or community art approach. But at the same time it was a radical experiment [with living differently], and it could only be a radical experiment because it was research-driven, because ruangrupa itself is a multidisciplinary collective made up of journalists, architects, artists, and educators. So hopefully [these kinds of radical impulses are] what artistic researchers can give to this field [of art education and pedagogy]. 

[When did artistic research begin historically, and has it changed in terms of understanding, concepts, and methods since then? ]I sort of tried to answer that question at the beginning when I said that for many people in the field, artistic research is a concept that began with Christopher Frayling in London in the 1990s, while for others it may have begun with Pythagoras and his equation of science, mathematics, and musical harmony more than 2500 years ago. I think the problem here is that the term "art" in the sense - literally in the linguistic sense - that we use it today has only existed since the mid-18th century. So it's actually a very recent term. And before that, all the sciences, all the academic disciplines, but also all the professions were called "artes" or arts. 

This was a semantic shift that happened in the 18th century. And not only is it a historical shift, but it's a very regionally limited shift, one that only happened in Western culture. If you look at the whole of Africa, for example, or the whole of Asia, the notion of art in that sense exists only as a Western import, including the distinction between art and craft, [and the concept of art as something removed from everyday life]. I think all these distinctions are problematic. I am perhaps old-fashioned in suggesting that we should consider returning to the older notion of the "artes," where we don't make these distinctions between arts, crafts, sciences, practices, and so on. 

I also think that this impulse was already present in the experimental art movements of the 20th century, such as Soviet Constructivism, Fluxus, and Situationism. They were already making these proposals. 

[Is there a relationship between artistic research and digital cultures?]

This is a can of worms. We [both] had a conversation earlier about what we actually define as digital cultures. You can define digital cultures more pragmatically or colloquially as everything that has to do with electronics that work with zeros and ones, the devices that we use in our everyday lives and the networks that distribute them. Then there's a more theoretical, scientific definition of digitality that has nothing to do with electronics at all, according to which, for example, the keys of a piano are a digital system because they are differentiated. But if we understand "digital cultures" in the sense of how, for example, the Internet and contemporary computing have changed visual culture, everyday culture, and society, then of course we can observe that there has actually been a return to this older notion of "ars". If you look at a company like Google, you can't really tell whether their work is scientific, engineering, media, design, or political. What is a device like this cell phone that [I'm holding up to the camera]? It's all these things at once. You can describe it much better with the pre-modern or medieval notion of "ars" than with the modern notions of technology, science, design, and so on. This also means that we have to rethink what we actually define as artistic research. In a way, it comes down to rescuing something that was lost [in the past]. Poetics, for example, was still an academic [research] discipline for Aristotle and others, and [with artistic research] it needs to be brought back to being recognized as an academic research discipline. And then perhaps something [as trivial as] a digital mobile device is just a very good way to demonstrate this urgency, because it immediately makes clear why these so-called modern distinctions [between the arts, sciences, and other fields of knowledge and practice] are actually very outdated. 

[What is the future of artistic research?]

I think it's related to the very problem I tried to outline when I juxtaposed the notion of "ars" versus art. [The question of what is the future of artistic research] is, I think, inextricably linked to the question of what is the future of art, in the sense of how we understand art. [Today we still understand it more or less in the sense of "fine arts" or "beaux arts" as they were first defined in the mid-18th century. The question is whether this notion can still be maintained. Again, I would like to come back to documenta fifteen, because I think it was the first large-scale art event that also put this question on the map. Which actually asked: does it make sense that we still make these divisions [between art and other practices and fields of knowledge]? Does it make sense that we continue with these Western paradigms of art? In this sense, the future of artistic research is, first of all, that it could act as a catalyst for rethinking research as a whole. And in the best case, it could act as a catalyst that dissolves itself. If artistic research is successful, I think it will cease to exist because it will be superfluous. And in that sense, all research should be artistic research. But even [the word] "artistic" shouldn't make a difference in what we define or practice as research.